Category Archives: Twitter

Those of you who follow me on Twitter @shirleyayres will be aware that I ask lots of questions about the cost, outcomes and impact of publicly funded projects in the social sector. I am a strong believer that social media has an important role in promoting openness, transparency and accountability so I have decided to highlight examples of engagement (or not) via social media.

Submitting Freedom of Information (FoI) requests is a costly business both for the individual or organisation making the request and for the organisation responding. Could we make the process simpler and more cost effective by encouraging all organisations to make information about budgets, expenditure, outcomes and impact easily accessible on their websites and via social media? I would like to see all publicly funded organisations be more proactive in asking the public what information would help understanding of both the costs and value of projects, pilots, reports, research and toolkits.

For today an encouraging example of the responsiveness of the Health and Social Care Information Centre and a top tip for all organisations setting up a new Twitter account!

I received a prompt response via Direct Message and @hscic are happy for me to share the information they have provided.

“You asked about the cost of rebranding. We’re happy to be open. A budget of £90,000 was allocated for direct estate, ICT and branding costs associated with the name change. Spending is being strictly limited to core and purely functional activity. An internal project team has taken a practical, considered view on what needs to change to make the new name work, and a Steering Group, led by Sir Nick Partridge, one of HSCIC’s non-executive directors, has provided scrutiny and governance of the project plans, including the budget. I hope this helps!”

On a separate note if you are setting up a new Twitter account as part of a rebranding exercise it is worth taking note of the following!

I am often asked about simple tools which will help with engagement, promotion and analysing the impact of using social media. The following tools offer a basic free service and the option of paid for services to provide a more customised platform and detailed analysis. You may wish to include these recommendations when developing your digital engagement strategy. You will need a Twitter account to access these tools.

RebelMouseprovides a quick and easy way for people to catch up on your latest news, posts and tweets. RebelMouse takes your social presence across the major networks and organizes it into what it calls a “beautiful, dynamic and social front page”. Twitter: @RebelMouse

Vizify “a picture is worth a thousand words” Vizify provides a personal website based on your social media profiles. Vizify creates a series of interactive infographics which provide your online visual biography. One of the most popular Vizify services is animating your Twitter profile as a short video. Twitter: @vizify

Storifyallows users to tell stories by collecting updates from social networks and creating stories or timelines using social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Twitter: @Storify

bit.ly is a URL shortening and bookmarking service which enables you to save, share , track and discover links from around the web. Today the post which has been shared most widely. Clicking “view stats” provides real time information about who is clicking on your links. Twitter: @Bitly

Tweetreachallows you to find out how far your tweet has travelled, who is talking about it and how many people saw it. Use TweetReach to analyze recent Twitter activity about your hashtag or URL and get social analytics on reach, exposure, tweets and contributors.Twitter: @tweetreachapp

TweetChat is a way of having conversations in real-time using hashtags on Twitter. Particularly useful for tweet chats that include a specific hashtag to link those tweets together in a virtual conversation. Many conferences now have a hashtag to encourage wider engagement with the speakers and presentations. More informal Twitter chats can happen over a longer period of time when a group of people all tweet about the same topic using a hashtag. Twitter: @TweetChat

What is your favourite social media tool?

Further recommendations via Twitter (updated January 2014)

Pocket(formerly Read It Later) When you find something you want to view later: text, video, images and other content put it in Pocket. Save items with one click. Save directly from your browser or from apps like Twitter, Flipboard, Pulse and Zite. Twitter: @Pocket

Followed by an insightful post from @NathanConstable about the police use of social media and the reasons why some chief officers are reluctant to embrace social media:

1. With the best will in the world some just don’t “get it” and will need to be convinced of its value.
2. There is a fear of loss of control of message. Everything has to be corporate.
3. There is a fear that some of their officers will damage the reputation of the force by tweeting things they shouldn’t.

On the 25th January 15 people assembled around 7.30 in the Kernel office to start the 30 hour novel writing marathon. I was one of them. It was a great experience and it was encouraging to see how quickly the group bonded sharing tips, encouraging thoughts and discussing their individual challenges. The different approaches taken by this diverse group were fascinating. Thanks to @SusyPote who kept us well fed and watered over two long days.

A big thank you to Kernel for running this innovative event. I did not manage to finish my novella but there was so much learning from taking part. Congratulations to everyone who has submitted their novels by the deadline. I will update when the public voting for the winning novel starts tomorrow.

Lessons for the Care Sector?

How to move from thinking to doing in 30 hours. There was so much energy and focus from everyone I spoke to about being involved in #NaNoWriWee. I am left wondering what could be achieved for care if we gathered together a group of motivated and inspired people from across the care sector for two days with a radical brief to redesign the care, health and care systems which any one of us may need!

The WordPress.com stats helper prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Interesting to see the top referring site was Twitter!

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 7,800 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 13 years to get that many views.

An interesting Twitter discussion prompted by a session at the All Change! 2012: Reshaping Local Public Services event organised by Improvement and Efficiency East Midlands with the underlying themes of commissioning and new models of service delivery.

Community Catalysts are an innovative social enterprise working to harness the talents of people and communities to provide high quality small scale, local care and support services. @CommCats

Whose Shoes was founded by Gill Phillips who is passionate about personalisation in health and social care. Whose Shoes? is an innovative resource which engages people to deliver public services in more creative ways.@WhoseShoes

The purpose of Blue Light Camp was focused particularly on the use of social media/technology solutions and problems faced by first response services – particularly police, fire, ambulance but including social care and auxiliary services which have attached involvement.

The power of the ‘unconference’ is to (as was said yesterday) to capture more of the networking that happens around more traditional conferences and growing some of the more interesting conversations that develop and pushing them to the centre rather than keeping them at the periphery.

After large scale introductions, the pitches for the sessions started and I could see some of the difficulties in making decisions about where to go.

I started at a session based around ideas in the ‘Art of Deception’ and took part in a fascinating and wide ranging series of conversations about some of the darker forces and concerns about the use of social media as well as drawing and sharing experiences of the benefits.

It’s easy to be swayed and entranced by the power of the digital and new waves of communication but there are still rules and patterns of behaviour to be learnt. Some ‘mistakes’ are made through the spread of misinformation unintentionally but there can also be mischief-makers and worse who can see different ways of spreading and using the power of the tool in malicious ways.

We can (and often do) make mistakes in our uses of social media. Sometimes the best thing to do is to apologise and move on. We should treat our ‘users’, ‘customers’, ‘the general public’ as adults (if they are!) and we will gain more respect through honesty and reliability as a result – but there’s a lot of latent fear of ‘bad use’.

It was a conversation that I continued over lunch with some of the other attendees and one that made me realise how near we are to the beginning of our learning cycles about both potential perils and opportunities afforded to us by our use of networks of communication and that today’s Twitter will be tomorrow’s MySpace. Platforms change, but ways of communicating change more slowly.

Immediately after lunch, I attended a session on co-production. This is an area possibly where social care are slightly ahead of the game with the push for more user involvement/engagement. What followed was an interesting discussion on how to use the ‘general public’ to have a stake in the services we need and use – even if we are not aware of it – like the fire service. There was a lot we can learn in social care as a whole though from the suggestions shared – such as encouraging engagement and responses through the use of Bubblino. How do we encourage ‘micro feedback’ and use it in our services as some of the traditional feedback mechanisms (long PDF documents and filling in ‘response’ forms) can be dry and encourage the same people who are time-rich to have the louder voices. It is an area that definitely needs more creative thought and it was useful to share information across different services rather than – to put it bluntly – to reinvent the wheel in an infinite amount of ways.

I then attended a session of brainstorming about a new potential platform/web site/forum/online space for First Responders to collate and share information outside the silos that are currently in place. It’s an area that interests me particularly as I think we naturally allay into our ‘work based’ personae in order to build protective silos and can easily forget the sometime crucial element of who we are ‘working for’ ultimately.

It’s often seen between and within health and social care. My simplistic solution to some of these problems in the past where they have existed locally is to co-locate training or even visits so that we can meet and understand the ‘people behind the telephone’. Grumbling about ‘district nurses’ is easy but when you know Amy who was very friendly and made you a cup of tea, it’s more difficult to grumble and then, when you have an immediate issue, you make a point of calling Amy because she’s ‘easier to talk to’ than ‘some of the others’ then you can see the differences breaking down.

When Joe from the local police station visited and you had a laugh with him, you’ll feel less intimidated or concerned about calling him over what you might think is a minor issue or question. It doesn’t always work like that of course, but knowing people makes it easier to speak to them about the little things that come up. So that’s how it is face-to-face – can these relationships grow in parallel ways online? I have no doubt. There are some people who I have built up relationships with online and would seek to enter conversations with them to ask questions/support in a more private forum (email/DM) and I can see that happening more frequently. Again, it’s all about trust.

The final session I attended was a fascinating breakdown of information about how twitter in particular was used during the riots last summer. Farida Vis, a communications academic who has been researching the use of social media as a part of the Reading the Riots research gave a presentation/initiated a conversation about the way the social media was used in a civil emergency situation. She has written a blog post here which I highly recommend as she explains the premise and results of her research directly. The slides she spoke from were also shared here. Particularly interesting is the visualisation which she represents about the spread of rumours and the ways the rumours were quelled.

I may well return to a more extensive post about the use of social media during the riots so I won’t feedback more extensively now except to recommend you read the links I shared above.

So after some initial anxiety about attending, I found Blue Light Camp both invigorating and compelling. I have more ideas, more contacts and more incentive to return to work and ‘make a difference’ – what I am struck by is how many motivated, interested and exciting people there are in this sector and how much we can do when we ignore some of the barriers which are often used to divide us into different sectors.

And I got a blue pig.

So thanks to the incredible organisation team and sponsors. Thanks to all the attendees and thanks for the kindness, friendliness and openness. It was a compelling and thought-provoking Sunday in Manchester. I hope to be back.

Over the last week, well – over the past few months really, I’ve had a few thoughts swooshing around in my head about my use of a pseudonym rather than my ‘real’ name in social networking or rather on blogs and Twitter.

I use my real name on Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn but felt that on Twitter and on blogs I would be too exposed. My desires to explore the medium of social networking both personally but also to increase my professional knowledge and to identify myself as a ‘social worker’ led to my initial reluctance to add my name to my posts.

I have checked out my employers attitudes to my writing which seems to be along the lines of absolutely maintaining confidentiality and not bringing my employer into disrepute but these would be bounds I would keep to regardless, not least because I am bound by a code of conduct by my profession which extrapolates out to all areas of communication including social media. My managers know I have a blog. They know something vague about Twitter in that it exists but they may or may not read my posts. There are definitely some people in positions of authority both in my local authority and in my NHS Trust who know exactly who I am and that I use Twitter – although we rarely ‘converse’ directly.

I can’t help feeling that I would be more comfortable attaching my name to my posts if the GSCC had some clear and specific guidance regarding social media but I understand that they are about to be disbanded and this role will remain within the means of the College of Social Work to take forward. And they must.

I see some very concerning uses of social media by people who claim to be social workers and it makes me worry if, by not giving my actual name (which would be checkable against the GSCC as I am a registered Social Worker) I lose some of that trust and authenticity that is so important when sharing information online. When I see someone with ‘social worker’ or ‘student social worker’ in their twitter profile describing a visit they have attended or encouraging people to expose more personal information about them into a public forum, I worry that by remaining anonymous, I lose some of the trust that people may have in me.

I’m also meeting more people in face to face settings that I have previously only known on Twitter. Obviously, it’s impossible to hide my identity there and there’s something wonderfully refreshing about being able to be open about who and what you are, do and say.

So what am I afraid of? Having established that I feel I operate well within guidelines provided by the GSCC and my employer why the funny cow name and face rather than my real ones?

Firstly I don’t want anything to detract from the work I do on a day to day level. While I would never discuss people I work with in these media, would people whom I am working with who find me and follow me, worry that I might? What would I do if someone I worked directly with ‘followed’ me? Would this be a concern or not? While I’m clear that Facebook requests are refused without second thought – where do the Twitter boundaries fall?

I don’t want to be a ‘star’ social worker (I’m not, by the way, saying I would be if I were to attach my name here but I am turning my hand increasingly to writing). I want to be a social worker that promotes the profession positively and yes, I’ll have some conversations on Twitter about whether Pandas are better than Crocodiles but that shouldn’t impact on my professional status. Indeed, the way the world is going, I feel it is increasingly difficult to divide ourselves into ‘work’ and ‘free time’ entities. We become the mass of what we do, how we communicate and moreover how we are perceived.

I see doctors, nurses and occupational therapists increasingly using their own names in these fora and I do wonder if I have been overcautious and I would actually gain far more by ‘coming out’ than I could ever potentially lose.

I’m moving away from ‘anonymity’ as a default and my defence of pseudonymity is fading. I feel comfortable standing publicly by the words I publish and I write as if I had my name attached in any case.

However, I am aware than once I cross ‘that line’ I can never go back.

I’d be interested in the thoughts of others. As is probably obvious, I am moving towards a public identification of my writing online but would welcome thoughts, comments etc before I finally make the ‘leap’.

This is a way that the world is changing. I think a point comes where in order to gain trust you may well need to have a name attached.